Setting Sail: Early American History from the Water

Course Description

Most of us today are landlubbers. Our modes of travel, sustenance, communication – all are essentially land based. But things were not always this way. For most of the colonial period, waterways, not land, were the center of life, travel, and the economy. There were no highways on land; only great shipping lanes and natural sea currents. Boats were just as common as carts and carriages. If you wanted to send a letter, it likely made its way by ship. Imported food, manufactured goods, and enslaved men and women – these all arrived by water. Water was life, in so many ways.

This course invites you back into a different time, when oceans, inlets, and rivers—and those who knew how to navigate them—ruled the world. The only way to really fully understand this reversed perspective is to experience it for yourself! Therefore, we will be getting out on the water for half of our class sessions – whether on a large and safe Coast Guard certified sailboat, or a motorboat, or on kayaks. Providence sits at the head of the Narragansett Bay, a 25 mile long protected body of water that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is also a microcosm of early American history, touching on Native history, early colonial arrival, slavery and the slave trade (African and Indian), warfare, politics, environmental history, animal-human relations, and the rhythms of everyday life. Combining in-classroom instruction with on the water excursions around the Narragansett Bay, this class will forever change your perspective of the water and early American history.

This course focuses on colonial America and the wider Atlantic world, roughly between the period of early colonization in the 16th and 17th centuries up through the American Revolution. It has two primary components: classroom instruction and on the water experience. Over the course of the two weeks, we will split our time equally in the classroom and on the water.

For the classroom days, we will meet for three hours for short lectures, videos, interactive activities, short reflection writing assignments, local walking field trips, and the discussion of assigned readings. The assigned readings will be drawn from primary sources (written by people in the colonial period) as well as some essays by present-day historians. The purpose of the readings is give insights into the importance of waterways in various contexts (trade, colonization, communication, everyday life, warfare, etc.) while allowing students to learn how to read and interpret various kinds of sources. Part of this skill development will be in reading maps, including older, colonial maps at the John Carter Brown Library, as well as modern nautical charts. We will spend five of the ten days in the classroom (or on campus more generally).

For our on the water days, we will take shorter day trips (3-5 hours) to various destinations around the Narragansett Bay, including: Providence, Bristol, Newport, Gaspee Point, and Jamestown Island. Our water excursions will be on a combination of a) larger sailboats that are larger, safe, stable, and Coast Guard certified (3 days); b) smaller registered and insured motorboats (1 day); or c) kayaks (1 day). For one of the outings, we will be exploring a section of protected coastline in kayaks – which is also an important perspective, since many Natives, Africans, and colonists navigated the watery landscape in personal watercraft, too – rowboats and canoes.

The point in our readings and on the water experience is to immerse ourselves in a very different world – one in which waterways were central to absolutely everything. Mail, communication, travel, immigration, trade, commerce, enslavement, liberation – these all required navigating the waterways that we now so casually drive over (with cars) or fly over (with airplanes). Highways and our modern technology have rendered this water-centric world almost invisible. And with our land-centric focus, we have also lost the essential wonder and awe of the power of the ocean and waterways. Oceans and seas are beautiful, but they were also capricious and dangerous in the wrong conditions. The same sea that brought produce and letters could also devastate coastal communities and sink the ship of even the most experienced captain. To be on the water was to be humbled – to learn to work with nature, to feel small. To successfully master the water, early Americans had to be close readers of nature: tides, currents, weather, the stars, the moon, and other natural phenomenon and telltale signs. In small ways, these, too, are part of this course: to have a greater appreciation for the full skill set required to be on the water, read the surroundings, and safely get from port to port. Their world is not ours, but for two weeks, this course invites you to experience that water-centric world in small (and safe!) doses.

Learning Objectives
As a result of taking this class, students will:
1) Experience first-hand the view of land from the water, and how that perspective reshapes our understanding of how people navigated their worlds;
2) Have a new perspective on early American history – from the water, as men, women, and children would have understood and experienced it;
3) Understand these perspectives from the primary and secondary sources - written by people who lived in that time period and by scholars;
4) Respect the intimate knowledge of Native Americans and coastal waterways – all of which they mostly shared with colonial Americans.

Prerequisites: As this course entails several day-long excursions, students may not enroll in a second course during this term.

There are no prerequisites for this class, except for a willingness to experience new things and have fun! No sailing experience is necessary.